RE: ontape vs onbar

Richard Spitz wrote > > >Ontape is quick and easy, but does not guarantee consistent > restores if databse is active when backed up. > > I simply don't believe that! It's the first time I've heard this claim > of inconsistent restores with ontape. Maybe you mean that any activity > that happens after the begin of the ontape backup won't show up in > the restore, but that's expected behavior. > > Can you substantiate your claim that ontape delivers > inconsistent restores? > No. I was wrong, as has been pointed out once or twice since. I will not be so quick to reply to things I do not know fully about in future. My only defence is that I do not have the luxury of working on live systems, perhaps this is why :-)) Colin Bull c.bull@videonetworks.com sending to informix-list

I would like to impart the benefit of my wisdom to this topic. in the beginning there was Turbo. Turbo had to be stopped in order to get consistent backups. It was not good, but verily it worked quite well. next came Online. Online was much better. It had this new utility called ontape which allowed online archiving which meant that 24 by 7 performance could be provided. With the combination of backing up the system and the logs recovery was possible to the point of the last committed transaction. But ontape was, and verily still is, very limited. It worked really well if all the data could be archived to one tape drive. It worked really well if it was operated in an attended fashion. But sadly, ontape was not enough for many database administrators. their databases could not be backed up to one tape, they wanted unattended overnight backups, and they wanted to integrate the archives and log backups into their enterprise backup systems. hence onbar was born. It did virtually the same job as ontape but in a more sophisticated way. The combination of onbar and ISM was the equivalent of ontape, but offered even more flexibility in recovery, including such things as point-in-time recovery. But it is very apparent that there are many of you who have been in the darkness about this for many years. maybe we should all learn more about onbar, after all, an IBM Informix tech support person told us today that ontape wasn't supported any more. Interesting!

malcolm wrote: > I would like to impart the benefit of my wisdom to this topic. > > in the beginning there was Turbo. Turbo had to be stopped in order to > get consistent backups. It was not good, but verily it worked quite > well. > > next came Online. Online was much better. It had this new utility > called ontape which allowed online archiving which meant that 24 by 7 > performance could be provided. With the combination of backing up the > system and the logs recovery was possible to the point of the last > committed transaction. > > But ontape was, and verily still is, very limited. It worked really > well if all the data could be archived to one tape drive. It worked > really well if it was operated in an attended fashion. > > But sadly, ontape was not enough for many database administrators. > their databases could not be backed up to one tape, they wanted > unattended overnight backups, and they wanted to integrate the > archives and log backups into their enterprise backup systems. hence > onbar was born. It did virtually the same job as ontape but in a more > sophisticated way. The combination of onbar and ISM was the > equivalent of ontape, but offered even more flexibility in recovery, > including such things as point-in-time recovery. So far, so good. > But it is very apparent that there are many of you who have been in > the darkness about this for many years. And here too... > maybe we should all learn > more about onbar, after all, an IBM Informix tech support person told > us today that ontape wasn't supported any more. I'm not sure how to parse that sentence; it seems to be two separate sentences inappropriately joined by a comma where a semi-colon is the minimum stop that should be used. I have no big problem with the first part, especially if you mean "Maybe we should all learn about ON-Bar after all." However, the second part is problematic, whether the sentence starts 'After all, an IBM Informix ...' or just 'An IBM Informix ...'. I can't immediately dispute whether some IBM Informix tech suppor person said that, but if they did, the comment was plain wrong. Someone pointed out to me (thanks Alexey) that XPS does not include ontape, so a comment of mine which implied that ontape was available with XPS is wrong. But in IDS 9.x (and 7.31), ontape is still very much available and supported. -- Jonathan Leffler #include <disclaimer.h> Email: jleffler@earthlink.net, jleffler@us.ibm.com Guardian of DBD::Informix v2003.04 -- http://dbi.perl.org/

Well, almost. tbtape (or at least its onmonitor-embedded cousin) was always part of Turbo. It just didn't get online or incremental archives until 4.0 (OnLine). The name tbtape hung around for some time after the rename. By the time they got the "on..." binary names together they were almost ready to ditch the highly popular, successful and memorable product name to a difficult and awkward one with an unfortunate resemblance to that of a profoundly ineffective, now-former leader of the opposition. Wonder whether it'll ever be renamed dstape. Or idstape. Andy malcolm.weallans@btopenworld.com (malcolm) wrote in message news:<3efc1745.0404150811.7e5b5424@posting.google.com>... > I would like to impart the benefit of my wisdom to this topic. > > in the beginning there was Turbo. ..